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I Don't Care If You Like It
Women are tired of being judged by the Esquire metric
By Rebecca Traister
Last week, I got into a fight on Twitter with New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait, whose work I respect, and it wasn’t about anything that either of us had written; rather, we were tussling over the merits of a piece written by Tom Junod, for Esquire, about how today’s 42-year-old women are hotter than ever before.
There’s no need to linger over our differences: I thought the article was a piece of sexist tripe, celebrating a handful of Pilates-toned, famous, white-plus-Maya-Rudolph women as having improved on the apparently dismal aesthetics of previous generations; my primary objections to the piece have been ably laid out by other critics. Chait tweeted that he viewed the piece as a “mostly laudable” sign of progress: a critique not of earlier iterations of 42-year-old womanhood, but rather of the old sexist beauty standards that did not celebrate those women; he saw it as an acknowledgment of maturing male attitudes toward women’s value.
. . .
Instead, I’ve been thinking about an anecdote in Tina Fey’s Bossypants. Amy Poehler, then new to "Saturday Night Live," was engaging in some loud and unladylike vulgarity in the writers’ room when the show’s then-star Jimmy Fallon jokingly told her to cut it out, saying, “It’s not cute! I don’t like it!” In Fey’s retelling, Poehler “went black in the eyes for a second, and wheeled around on him,” forcefully informing him: “I don’t fucking care if you like it.”
I don’t think I’m alone in feeling this way. Just this week, the journalist Megan Carpentier wrote a piece about the evolving public appraisals of Hillary Clinton’s facial expressions that concluded with her suggestion that we get over the idea of 2014 being “the year of the strong female politician” and aim instead for “the year of the strong female politician who doesn’t give a fuck if you think she’s pretty.”
Carpentier doesn’t care if you like it. Neither does Buzzfeed writer Arianna Rebolini, who wrote this week about the video for John Legend’s song “You and I,” about the diverse beauty of women. Rebolini dutifully yay-thanks-ed the fact that it's “uplifting to see these women—of all ages, sizes, ethnicities—in the spotlight” before confessing her discomfort with how the song’s lyrics fall into the well-worn pop tradition of celebrating the beauty of women who don’t know they’re beautiful. “These songs, which presume to assure women that they are attractive (and, by extension, worthwhile),” Rebolini writes, “assume that the singer’s relationship to our bodies overrules our relationship with them."
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118735/problem-esquires-praise-42-year-old-women-amy-poehler
14 replies
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Score one for Traister!
Response to ismnotwasm (Reply #5)
The problem isn’t so simple as a man-versus-woman frame. Examples of this evaluative pattern are rarely as easy to parse as when a men’s magazine writer treats some women as steaks who’ve gotten tastier with age, Pilates, and feminism. After all, women ran the disciplinary committee that was so quick to dismiss rape charges at Hobart & William Smith. On Tuesday, Tennessee Representative Marsha Blackburn and other female anti-choice activists testified against the Women’s Health Protection Act, a bill that would ban onerous restrictions on abortion rights and that was sponsored by senators Tammy Baldwin and Richard Blumenthal, a man. Meanwhile, a bill to reverse the Hobby Lobby decision was co-sponsored by senators Patty Murray and Mark Udall, another man. Many of the sharpest take-downs of Junod’s piece came from men, and I want to note that my Twitter-sparrer Jonathan Chait yesterday wrote one of the finest and most astute pieces about the injustice of Harrell’s arrest.
Yay, thanks! No, really, I mean it.
But what all these issues, no matter how gigantically separated an Esquire puff piece and a Tennessee mother’s jailing for meth may seem, reflect back at us: How, in this country, every barometer by which female worth is measured—from the superficial to the life-altering, the appreciative to the punitive—has long been calibrated to “dude,” whether or not those measurements are actually being taken by dudes. Men still run, or at bare minimum have shaped and codified the attitudes of, the churches, the courts, the universities, the police departments, the corporations that so freely determine women’s worth. As Beyoncé observed last year, “Money gives men power to run the show. It gives men the power to define value. They define what’s sexy. And men define what’s feminine. It’s ridiculous.”
Yay, thanks! No, really, I mean it.
But what all these issues, no matter how gigantically separated an Esquire puff piece and a Tennessee mother’s jailing for meth may seem, reflect back at us: How, in this country, every barometer by which female worth is measured—from the superficial to the life-altering, the appreciative to the punitive—has long been calibrated to “dude,” whether or not those measurements are actually being taken by dudes. Men still run, or at bare minimum have shaped and codified the attitudes of, the churches, the courts, the universities, the police departments, the corporations that so freely determine women’s worth. As Beyoncé observed last year, “Money gives men power to run the show. It gives men the power to define value. They define what’s sexy. And men define what’s feminine. It’s ridiculous.”
Response to redqueen (Reply #6)
